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Two-Way Street ; Online Classes Let Professionals Teach and Students Learn on Their Own Time

Posted on: Tuesday, 6 September 2005, 06:00 CDT

When it's time for Jenn Crenshaw to teach her employment-law class, she finds the nearest Wi-Fi hotspot and turns on her laptop computer.

Crenshaw's full-time job is as human-resources manager at World Access, a Henrico County-based travel insurance and assistance company.

She teaches during her lunch hour, and in the mornings and evenings and on weekends.

Sometimes she sits on her deck at home and goes online to communicate with her students, who also are plugged into the Internet from all over the world.

"I would teach for free, but they have to pay me to grade," said Crenshaw, who has been teaching for the University of Phoenix since 2002. Her courses also include organizational behavior and human- resources management for the school's MBA program. Her students have included a professional basketball player in Europe.

The online university, which recently opened a physical campus on West Broad Street, has recruited several dozen full-time professionals in the Richmond area to serve as facilitators, the university's term for its part-time instructors of online classes.

Lorri Griffin, from her office at Owens & Minor's corporate training campus in Innsbrook, also finds time to check the home page of her online classes for the University of Phoenix and Western International University.

Like Crenshaw, Griffin balances teaching with a full-time job as a learning facilitator for the medical-supply firm. She said she is active with her general-studies and philosophy classes five days a week, but "I can go online anytime I like; I can do it at 4 a.m."

That's because there is no set class meeting time for the online courses. Instead, the courses are set up so that students and facilitators can go online whenever their schedule allows to read or post course material and participate in class discussions on message- board forums.

"It allows the students flexibility, but it also allows the instructors flexibility," said Griffin, who also teaches business- writing and persuasive-writing courses for Western International.

For online instructor Allen Moore, whose full-time job is business-process manager for Swedish Match North America, class time could be in a hotel room or an airport terminal.

"I travel a lot, and many of my students travel a lot," said Moore, who teaches classes that are closely related to the work he does for Swedish Match. He is an information-systems specialist, and his classes deal with how technology affects the workplace.

"I have had students from as far away as the South Pacific Islands to Sicily," said Moore, who has taught 23 courses for the University of Phoenix in three years. His only previous teaching experience was at a community college in North Carolina, but he has more than 30 years of business experience and a master's degree.

Crenshaw, Griffin and Moore are part of the growing culture of online education, but they also are part of a vanguard of business professionals who are using online schools to pursue teaching without sacrificing time from their main careers.

Perhaps more importantly for their employers, the teachers consider online classes a two-way street: They learn from their students -- many of whom also have full-time jobs -- and apply what they have learned to their own jobs.

Crenshaw's supervisor at World Access, Cheryl Ames, said the company encourages its employees to teach or take online classes.

"We get the added benefit of not only of [Crenshaw's] experience but the feedback of her students, most of whom are working professionals," Ames said.

Online education is growing. The Chronicle of Higher Education recently reported that nearly 1 million students were enrolled in all-online education programs at the end of 2004, citing data collected by Eduventures Inc., a Boston-based education research firm.

Eduventures predicted more than 1.2 million students will be enrolled in fully online courses by the end of this year, or about 7 percent of all students enrolled at degree-granting institutions. At least 260,000 more students will enroll online in each of the next two years, the firm said.

Other, more traditional colleges are using online education or distance learning to varying extents. The Virginia Community College System has about 52,000 students enrolled in online courses, and that is growing by about 15 percent to 18 percent a year, said Timothy Tirrell, director of e-learning services for the system.

The University of Phoenix, the largest online university, said it has more than 200,000 students enrolled this year. Its local campus at 6600 W. Broad St. looks like a typical office building, occupying 30,000 square feet of second-floor office space, but it also has some hallmarks of a traditional campus. It has a large computer lab where students often gather in the afternoons. Surrounding a central administrative area are eight meeting rooms for courses that combine classroom instruction with online time.

Travis Allen, director of the Richmond campus, declined to disclose the enrollment at the local campus, but he said it has exceeded the university's expectations.

"I think that is due in large part to the fact that the corporate community here values education," he said. The school has 60 local faculty members now. Most of its local online instructors were teaching with the school before it opened a Richmond campus. They were recruited from a range of backgrounds, including the local business community and government agencies.

Allen said business classes have been among the most popular courses. The school's facilitators, he said, "must have a balance of educational and professional credentials." New instructors must teach a course under the supervision of a full-time faculty member.

Crenshaw, Moore and Griffin said they responded to advertisements from the University of Phoenix looking for instructors. They all have master's degrees -- Moore's in business administration, Crenshaw's in human-resource development and Griffin's in fine arts and creative writing -- and they all have more than three years of experience in their fields.

Plus, they all passed through what Moore called a rigorous vetting and training program for new faculty. They are paid on a per- class basis.

They say their classes are particularly popular for military families. "I have had students on Navy ships," Griffin said. "I've learned a lot about the military."

One of the criticisms of online courses is that they offer few or no opportunities for face-to-face interaction between students and instructors. Traditional colleges, while utilizing online tools for many educational programs, have been reluctant to adopt the model of fully online courses with part-time instructors.

"We are certainly seeing more of this blended learning cropping up in graduate education and executive education," said Richard Coughlan, associate dean of graduate and executive programs for the University of Richmond's Robins School of Business. "I think what many firms are experiencing and colleges are learning is that it is being overused in some cases. You are sometimes seeing courses where the content doesn't lend itself well to online learning."

Coughlan said online teaching may be well-suited to courses with "highly technical" content. But he said "the skills associated with leadership in today's environment are really going to need to be done in a traditional classroom environment."

The concerns about online education are understandable to Jud Sage, an adjunct professor at Northern Virginia Community College. He faced skepticism from colleagues when he started teaching online courses in May 2004 after 12 years of teaching traditional classroom courses for the college. He now teaches history classes online exclusively, and he has another part-time job running his own Web- design company.

"There is a lot of skepticism about it," Sage said. "That is fine, there should be, but I don't let it worry me now. I think I am communicating better with my students now."

Sage started using some online content in his classes in the mid- 1990s, when he set up a Web page where he posted reading materials for students. He said some students who do not participate in classroom discussions are more open in online courses, and he can interact more with every student: "When they e-mail me a paper, I have to e-mail them back."

Crenshaw, a self-described workaholic, grew up working in two family businesses and started her own business when she was in college. She said she has found that students are looking for teachers who are knowledgeable not just about "theories" but also involved in business on a daily basis.

"It's more important that I'm involved in leadership than that I have a degree in leadership," she said.

Crenshaw said she would be willing to teach in a traditional setting. "The classroom setting would be fine, but I wouldn't want to deal with the politics that occur in traditional education.

"I will always be in corporate America, and I will always teach," she said. "The ratio of how much I do each will probably change."

Source: Richmond Times - Dispatch

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